The capacity level of a manufacturing facility has a significant impact on the success of the facility. If the capacity level is insufficient for the demand, the manufacturing facility may dissatisfy and even lose customers. Some capacity planners seek to avoid this outcome by increasing the capacity level so as to mitigate the risk of losing business. However, any capacity that is not being used (e.g., idle capacity) contributes to lower margins and/or profits for the facility. Capacity planners continually seek to improve the performance (e.g., outcomes) of their manufacturing capacity plans so as to achieve a desired balance between the foregoing negative outcomes and/or other objectives and/or constraints.
Unfortunately, legacy techniques for planning manufacturing capacity are deficient at least as pertains to maximizing the performance of manufacturing capacity plans. Specifically, some legacy techniques might establish a manufacturing capacity plan based on some then-current set of information (e.g., current capacity, product demand forecasts, inventory levels, etc.). These techniques then track certain metrics during actual manufacturing operations to determine various measures of performance for the manufacturing capacity plan. For example, the state of certain equipment might be tracked over time to determine a utilization percentage for that equipment. If any of the performance measures are at an undesired level and/or exhibit an undesired trend, however, such techniques are limited as to the actions that can be executed to improve the performance of subsequent capacity plans. In this case, the capacity planner is left to speculate on those actions and/or manually adjust the planning method, which can lead to unexpected negative performance responses. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact there is a substantially changed set of information that is to be considered when performing such subsequent capacity planning, which can also lead to unexpected negative performance responses. A technological solution is therefore needed to efficiently deliver timely adjustments to manufacturing capacity plans so as to improve the performance of the plans.
What is needed is a technique or techniques to improve over legacy techniques and/or over other considered approaches. Some of the approaches described in this background section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.